The improvements
were consciously referred to the machine as such, however much the
practical success was really influenced by the degree of its
adjustment to the mental conditions of the workingmen. The new
movements of scientific management and of experimental psychology aim
toward bringing this adaptation consciously into the foreground and
toward testing and studying systematically what technical variations
can best suit the psychophysical status of man.
Those who are familiar with the achievements of scientific management
remember that by no means only the complicated procedures on a high
level are in question. The successes are often the most surprising
where the technique is old, and where it might have been imagined that
the experiences of many centuries would have secured through mere
common sense the most effective performance. The best-known case is
perhaps that of the masons, which one of the leaders of the scientific
management movement has studied in all its details.[27] The movements
of the builders and the tools which they use were examined with
scientific exactitude and slowly reshaped under the point of view of
psychology and physiology. The total result was that after the new
method 30 masons completed without greater fatigue what after the old
methods it would have taken 100 masons to do, and that the total
expense for the building was reduced to less than a half in spite of
the steady increase of the wages of the laborers.
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